Golf has been a popular form of entertainment for many years, crossing many cultures. In recent years there has been interest in applying new technology to creating new entertainment variants of the game. Driving ranges have become popular with as many as 100 (or more) “hitting bays” on multiple levels.
More recently a new variant of golf play has emerged which allows players at driving ranges to play entertainment games, hitting golf balls toward targets which are associated with scores.
One way of doing this is to produce golf balls with imbedded Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIDs) in all of the golf balls used in the facility. These chips have encoded values that can be detected by a generated radio frequency and antenna. The RFID in the ball is associated with a player or a particular hitting bay before it is hit by the player. When the player uses an RFID ball that is hit into a target area, that particular ball RFID is detected at a target equipped with RFID detection devices, it enables electronic scoring of hits on particular targets or target areas and determination of which player hit which target area. This information can then be automatically detected by computer systems and used to score games that the player participates in. Other technologies that may be used in combination with, or instead of, RFID identification have also been suggested. These include the use of Doppler-radar, or lasers.
Some of the aforementioned techniques are in use in commercial entertainment centers in the US and overseas.
There has been ongoing interest in creating a wagering system based on entertainment golf techniques, as described above, but with the added attraction of allowing wagers and financial and/or merchandise prizes. But, a wagering system must have much higher levels of accuracy and integrity for tracking the balls at the targets and generally in the system than are required for an entertainment-only system. In a non-wagering system there is a low standard of precise ball identification required and a relatively high tolerance for error. If a small percentage of balls fail to be identified properly by RFID, or other tracking mechanism, and do not register properly on a hit to a target area, it may be tolerated (up to some reasonable threshold). However, in a wagering system where the cost of a wager itself, as well as the potential to win monetary awards or other prizes of value are at stake, there is much less tolerance, either from players, game operators or from governmental regulators. As the stakes increase, the tolerance for inaccuracy lessens. Accuracy and reliability become quintessentially important. As a comparable example, consider the problems that would arise if someone were playing a slot machine and even 5% of the time when a dollar was spent to play there was no play and/or no chance to win due to an error or inaccuracy from the system. It would not be tolerated by players and operators, and governmental regulators would never approve such a system. Although there is some reasonable tolerance for very rare errors (all slot machines are typically marked, “Malfunction voids all plays and pays.”), the error rate must be determined to be a miniscule fraction of a percent, and in that case it is required that players get refunds for any play cost in the event of a malfunction. Gaming regulators can be expected to require extremely high levels of accuracy including mechanisms to ensure that players are never “cheated” and that the game performs precisely as represented.